iPhone 5s and 5c Accounted for 76% of All Smartphones Sold in Japan Last Month

One of the biggest pieces of overseas news in the wake of the iPhone 5s' launch was the news that Apple's beloved smartphone would at last be carried by NTT DoCoMo, the largest cellular carrier in Japan. At the time, questions swirled about as to whether it'd be embraced by the country, and a new report from Kantar Worldpanel (via MacRumors) suggests that it has, indeed.

How well? Consider this--a full 76 percent of smartphones sold in Japan last October were iPhones, and a 61 percent of those were sold through DoCoMo. DoCoMo had long resisted Apple's smartphone partly out of Apple's refusal to allow the carrier to place pre-installed software in the devices, but a report surfaced in July demonstrating that it had lost 3.2 million users over four and a half years because it wouldn't carry the device.

Those numbers came to a head in September, when DoCoMo lost a record 68,000 subscribers ahead of the release of the new iPhones. These were likely the "compelling reasons" CEO Kazuto Tsubouchi cited for agreeing to take on the phone at last, and indeed, the iPhone 5s and 5c launched with DoCoMo on September 20 as they did in numerous countries worldwide.